Security Review Questions for AI Agent Access

Most security reviews for a new AI tool ask about encryption and stop there. Encryption at rest is table stakes; it says nothing about what happens when the thing you connected has agency, when it can read a project, draft a report, or update a field on its own initiative rather than only in response to a single API call a human triggered directly.

The direct answer: the security questions for an AI agent vendor are not the questions on a generic SaaS questionnaire. Ask five instead: can access be scoped to specific projects rather than the whole org, is there an admin-controlled connection quota, does every agent action land in the same audit log as human activity, what can the vendor itself see, and what happens to the agent's access the instant you disconnect it. A vendor with concrete answers to all five is treating agent access as a governed extension of the permission system you already have. One without them is asking you to trust the model's judgment instead.

The Security Questions That Actually Matter for an AI Agent

Score a vendor's answer against what a concrete, checkable answer sounds like, not a reassurance.

Question	What a good answer sounds like	Red flag
Can access be scoped to one project?	"A token scoped to project X can't see project Y"	"The agent has the same access as the connecting user's full account, org-wide"
Is there a connection quota an admin controls?	A specific number per plan tier, set by an admin	"There's no limit" or "we don't track that"
Does every agent action land in the audit log?	"Same log, same schema, as human activity, queryable in one place"	"We can pull logs on request" (a promise, not a system)
What can the vendor see?	A named, bounded list: which fields, for how long, for what purpose	Vague language like "aggregated insights" with no specifics
What happens on disconnect?	"Access ends immediately, revocation is a single action"	"Tokens expire within 24 hours" (a delay is not a revocation)

The diagram below lines up the same lifecycle a reviewer should be checking at each stage: what's true at connect, what should hold true while the agent is active, and what should happen the instant it disconnects.

Why a Generic Security Questionnaire Misses This

Standard SaaS security reviews were built for tools a human clicks through one screen at a time. Encryption, SSO, data residency, those questions still matter, but they assume the thing on the other end of the connection acts only when a person tells it to, once, for one specific request. An agent doesn't work that way: it can read across a project, chain several actions together, and act again without a fresh click from a human each time. Agent-native project management covers why that shift changes what "access" even means for a tool, and it's exactly why the five questions above sit outside a standard checklist. A vendor can pass every item on a generic questionnaire and still hand an agent org-wide, unaudited, unrevocable access, because nothing in the generic list asked about scope, quota, or revocation speed.

What Happens on Disconnect Matters as Much as What Happens on Connect

Reviewers spend most of their time on the connection step and almost none on the disconnection step, which is backwards. The connection step is the one everyone is watching closely because it's new and it's being approved for the first time. The disconnect step happens later, often when nobody senior is in the room, and it's the step that decides whether a bad trial or a compromised token actually stops mattering the moment someone notices. Ask the vendor to demonstrate revocation on a live connection during the review, not describe it. If pulling a token or removing an agent's persona takes a support ticket instead of one click in an admin screen, that's the answer to write down.

How Onplana Answers Each Question

Onplana connects agents over MCP with personal access tokens that can be scoped to specific projects rather than the whole org, so a compromised or misbehaving connection is contained to what it was actually given. Concurrent agent connections are capped by plan (2 on Free and Starter, 3 on Pro, 5 on Business, 10 on Enterprise, unlimited on Enterprise Plus) and gated behind an org.agent.connect permission key an admin controls, not something every user can turn on for themselves. Every agent tool call lands in the same audit trail as human activity, queryable in one place rather than scattered across a client-side log a vendor can't see. Onplana does not train AI models on customer project data; the connected model provider, Claude or Azure OpenAI depending on which one Onplana routes the request to, processes it at request time under enterprise data terms and doesn't retain it for training. Disconnecting an agent is the same action as removing a human teammate: pull its persona from People, and its access ends immediately. The full security and compliance overview covers the identity, encryption, and retention controls this sits inside, and Onplana's security posture next to Project Online's covers the comparison if that's the specific evaluation you're running.

A reviewer who gets concrete answers to the five questions above from any vendor, not just Onplana, has done the part of the security review that actually differs for an agent versus a normal integration. The rest of the review, encryption, residency, incident response, still applies exactly as it did before agents entered the picture. The full detail behind each of these controls is on Onplana's security page alongside the rest of the Onplana blog's agent-governance coverage for anyone running this evaluation end to end.